Talk about video games, movies, music, news, and technology without wading through a thousand dumb kids and dozen exclamation points after each sentence. Try it out for a few days and remember what it's like to breathe Internet air without getting two lungs full of stupid.

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One thing that The Next Level has always had in abundance is deep community involvement. From its humble beginnings to its modest present-day existence, a tightly knit group of informed enthusiasts has been the backbone of what TNL is all about.

With this latest round of improvements (some of which are still not live as of this writing), the goal is tripartite.

First off, we want to capitalize on all the talent in our forums and give our members new ways to express and
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This is my first ever blog as I don't often feel a need to talk about personal shit online. This seems like the perfect place to ramble about gaming matters, though, especially ones that don't necessarily suit a regular thread format.

While I have always loved playing and reading about video games, over time I decided that wasn't enough for me and my relationship to this medium. I look at this industry with all its talk on the internet and I get this urge to fix what I see as its biases,
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Maybe you've heard of the Defender III hoax, which had 17 pages of enemies in the non-existent game. Actually there was a proto, but it was nothing like that at all. Defender III was planned to be released around 1990 as a conversion kit for Nintendo Vs. Dualsystem cabinets supporting 2-player link play. The PCB is a Williams Y Unit like the hardware that Smash TV used. A dedicated cabinet was also designed, which would have been a sit-down one similar to Atari Games' Steel Talons. Both
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I finally got around to this a year later, it was a PSN *free game at the end of last year.

I liked the game, and it's really impressive for a single person. The art and animations are awesome.

The controls are basically spot on. I would say it feels similarly to Rogue Legacy for controls (very responsive), so it feels very good moving around. Overall for gameplay, it's an action game but goes very heavy on the puzzle side of everything. Many rooms are environmental
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So that's been some fun we've had yesterday with Malwarebytes, eh? That's just splendid. Thankfully I didn't lose much of anything, but man, this old laptop is not built to handle problems like that. It's thanks to that incident that I forgot to have this post ready for last night. Oh well. I was wondering why my song block looked longer than normal.

An oil change was due. I could tell the engine was running a bit rougher lately, so I take a moment before work on the last day of the
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Narc is not an unfair game, but rather a good challenge. Being a bit greedy helps so you can rack up some extra lives (every 100,000). You'll also get a free rocket with every 1up. Stage 3 (the bridge) is a great place for this- I had a 610K EOS bonus there. This was done on the default difficulty, 3/10.

Stage 1: 50 busts.
Stage 2: Didn't try for 50 busts. Maybe I should've. Held onto those rockets. There's a better place to use them anyway.
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I nearly forgot to post this today. That would have been a shame. I guess.

My mother did promise to prepare a special breakfast to observe my birthday, and she did deliver. A local grocery had a chocolate chip loaf of bread and she made french toast with it - a large quantity of it as well. I was very much stuffed by the time she was done with cooking.

The last time I played Alienation was over a year ago, a detail kept noted precisely to the second as that's the last
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I'm still getting too tired. I'll lay down early today and try to think of things like gum and freezing myself, but I'm about out of options otherwise. I'm rather unhappy with it.

One thing I failed to mention in direct response to the meeting was that it all worked well thanks to everyone's generosity. I provided transportation, another provided admission, and another provided food. Everything was spontaneous. It worked well because we made it work well.

It's out, and the good and bad news both is that it doesn't seem to be making any kind of impact on the grand scale of things. Looks like I'll have to play the long game after all. I guess this goes to show that any kind of gut instinct I had on this being a smash hit out of the gate was decidedly misplaced, and that staying with the course otherwise has proved to be the better decision. Meanwhile, with it being in public, it has renewed my focus on doing work for
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2017 ends with me being sick. A little sick. Christmas Eve started with my wife waking up to a fever of 100.3. She didn't come with me to the family gathering. With that holiday making part of it, I had four consecutive days off of work and all my body wanted to do was sleep. I could tell things were still off yesterday, and today I left for work with a body temperature of 99.6. The most recent reading when I returned home put me down to 95 somehow. Thankfully I'm not impaired enough to be bed ridden
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30 in a 30 and suddenly, for the first time in a few years, I get pulled over. Officer says that he saw the license plate light go out and that it came back on once I pulled into the restaurant parking lot where I settled so that we would be off the road. How convenient. It took about ten minutes until everything was verified for me to be in the clear. That's a relief. I guess he was bored, and it's not like it would be unreasonable to assume anyone driving at that time of night wouldn't have at
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I'm at the point now where I need to spend time like I did in another lifetime ago where I would just sit with a page and screw around with settings to see how things would change between alterations. I have my table data and I have some rudimentary but necessary functions in place. Fine. There's one table that I want to do and have certain rows show up, and the examples which I find on how to do something similar at places like stackoverflow haven't helped me. I can't get them to work as intended
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I was directly asked if I wanted to work an extra day this week. Usually they don't bother to do so. It caught me off guard, and I quickly muttered out a "not particularly" in response. It wasn't pressed, but his expression in response was enough to show disappointment. I honestly shouldn't feel as bad about it as I did, and it took a while for me to reconcile with it. I already do give up an average 65 hours of my week for them. That really should be enough.

Shopping is basically wrapped up. We're deciding that it's time for her PC to be upgraded, so everything has been slowly rolling in thanks to sales and the like. I'll be looking forward to building a PC again. It's been a while. I did get something for both of them, and it's definitely not something similar to things I've given before and something they'll do together. I hope they like it.

In anticipation of future time constraints with the holidays coming, a new IIDX coming, and
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Now I'm at the point where I consider it necessary to avoid looking at my statistic totals on Instagram, because it actually bothers me to see my follow count fluctuate and decrease from time to time. It shouldn't affect me at all, seeing as how I'm not making posts for the sake of earning popularity and approval of others, such as it is that the entire ultimate purpose of something like Instagram is pretty much purely for the sake of approval of others. Regardless, I already have 2000 pictures
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I painted myself in a corner for writing this week's entry. With little else planned out, I ended up doing basically nothing on my days off instead. Great. Maybe next week I'll actually get back to getting things done. Oh, and avoiding the consumption of coffee on the work days is proving to be the correct choice. Looks like I'll be on 5 Hour Drinks for a while to come.

Happy Armistice Day. I'm pretty sure I had written those exact words as a header for a previous observation.

What's bugging me this week is my stamina on the job. On the old original long route from so many months ago, I had to undertake specific times of the night and day to ingest certain foods or drinks, as well as shift between radio stations and having windows opened or closed, on top of other things like even pulling over to stop and walk around or just scream at the top of
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